When German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Dresden on October 3 to celebrate the twenty-sixth anniversary of the reunification of Germany, she was greeted with both cheers and insults. Some demonstrators shouted at her to resign, others applauded her. Security was extremely tight.

Merkel and German President Joachim Gauck, both of whom grew up in East Germany, endured the insults. Once inside the city’s beautifully restored opera house, the Semperoper, Norbert Lammert, the president of the German parliament, gave a powerful speech about defending values. He spoke about why Germans and Europeans should remain open to those who need protection.

Merkel’s decision to give such protection and safety to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the wars in Syria and Iraq has exposed a Europe that is now being torn between two competing agendas. The one that prevails will have a lasting consequence for Europe’s ability to act strategically.

The German chancellor represents one agenda. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, represents the other. Their respective reactions to the refugee crisis have defined their positions. Those reactions have also exposed the fragility of EU institutions as well as the lack of confidence of EU and national leaders.

Merkel’s agenda is an open one. Her decision to grant refuge to so many people was based on moral and humanitarian reasons. As a German but also a European, Merkel could no longer endure a Europe that did not open its doors to those escaping the suffering meted out day by day in Syria.

However, Merkel is paying a political price for her policies, as opponents not only in Germany but also in other European countries win increasing support for a closed Europe. They blame the chancellor for the growing rise of populist and anti-immigrant movements across Europe, even for the June 23 referendum decision by the British to leave the EU. The message from populist leaders is that national governments, not the EU, can determine Europe’s future.

That is Orbán’s agenda, probably even more so after he failed to achieve the required 50 percent turnout in a referendum on October 2. Voters had been asked to support or reject an EU relocation plan in which each member state would take in a share of migrants. Over 99 percent of the 3.3 million Hungarians who voted wanted to stop any mandatory relocation scheme. But the turnout was not enough to make the referendum binding. Orbán brushed aside that issue. He said he would in any case “change the constitution [to] reflect the will of the people. We will make Brussels understand that it cannot ignore the will of Hungarian voters.”

It is still unclear in what way Orbán intends to change the constitution. What is clear is that he risks putting his country on a major collision course not only with the EU—as if relations were not strained enough already—but also with EU law as enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty, which Hungary and all other member states ratified. In essence, Orbán’s agenda is becoming an increasingly national one that potentially challenges EU law.

The EU treaty is also about solidarity, as Merkel, Gauck, and Lammert repeatedly mention. It is easy to denigrate that word. Yet it was the principle of solidarity that brought Greece, Portugal, and Spain into the EU in the 1980s. Without that pull factor, there would have been no guarantee that this part of Southern Europe would have become stable and democratic.

Furthermore, it was the geostrategic aspect of solidarity that was later extended to the Baltic states, to Central and Eastern Europe, and to the Balkan countries of Bulgaria and Romania. As these nations joined the EU, this sense of European solidarity helped complete the reunification of the continent. It was about bringing freedom and democracy and peace to a wider Europe.

Merkel’s agenda is about using this solidarity to keep Europe together but also to remind Europeans how hard it was to build this European edifice and how hard it is to retain that sense of solidarity. Orbán’s agenda seems to downplay—if not ignore—how far Hungary has come since the barbed-wire fence that snaked along the border between Hungary and Austria was literally cut open with pliers in 1989.

Orbán, a former dissident who was denied a passport by Hungary’s former Communist regime, has now built a new fence between Hungary and Serbia to keep refugees from entering the country, even for transit purposes.

Putting up new barriers is but a short-term response to a crisis that affects all EU countries. It does not equip the EU to deal with the extraordinary challenges it now faces, from the refugee crisis and Brexit to the growing gulf in the transatlantic relationship. That is why Merkel’s agenda, expressed best on October 3 by Lammert, is for Germany and Europe to remain open to the world. Failing that, Europe—and with it, European solidarity—will become irrelevant.

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CaptainGinyu

October 04, 20169:46 am

Quote from the article:
"As a German but also a European, Merkel could no longer endure a Europe that did not open its doors to those escaping the suffering meted out day by day in Syria."
Merkel knows that the war in Syria is an illegal geo-political war, waged by some gulf states and their allies the US/EU, using terrorist organizations to oust the Assad government, in order to achieve the same result as in Iraq and Lybia: chaos, more influence for The West, less influence for Russia/China. If the US/EU wanted, the war in Syria could be stopped in no time.
Let us put things in a wider perspective. Who wouldn't want to be solidary and take helpless children out of a gruwesome war? Everybody would. But Europe has seen decades long immigration without consulting the people if they agree or not, together with a wide variety of documented problems arise.
Solidarity is one of the most raped words of today's vocabulary. Under the pretext of solidarity, Europe, and only Europe, has to allow an invasion of non-Western immigrants, many of which low IQ Muslim men with little to offer to the developed European culture, causing higher crime rates, rape, and not in the last place a stronger and stronger aversion of the average European towards strangers.
But I guess people who think like you do just won’t see that things like Brexit and the desire for similar measures in other countries, in other words, more desintegration and more nationalist sentiment, are the results of just that same rotten EU policy, corrupted to the bone of more and more integration and that fake solidarity narrative.
A few questions to consider:
-Why does Europe and only Europe has to be solidary and open it’s doors to the whole suffering world?
-Why are the negative aspect of non-Western (high % Islamic) immigration always downplayed? -Why are the European people for decades being conditioned to believe immigration and a multi-cultural society is good, while it is failing all around?
-Why have opposing views been demonized for decades by the liberal, leftist post-war European political landscape?
-There are many possible ways to aleviate suffering of people fleeing wars and/or poverty. Why is only the option of taking them to Europe pushed through the throat of the European people? What is wrong with helping the neighbouring countries deal with the refugees? What is xenophobic about observing what is happening and acting upon it in a clear-minded and compassionate way?

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anulu

October 04, 201612:00 pm

It was also the same solidarity that left Central Europe locked under Sovier regime based on Yalta, for 40 long years!
Sure it was possible to reunite the continent after the fall of the USSR, in the common interest of both Central and Easrern Europe and Western Europe.
The article seems to suggest that this has empowered Germany to call in millions of illegal migrants to flow through several EU countries without the smallest control, often paralysing their transport networks and allowing the entry of terrorists to kill innocent people, and to abuse its power via Brussels to push through a quota system which is against the will of most European peoples.
Central Europe joined the EU in the hope of economic convergence but instead the West chose to make China rich and Germany to make Nord Stream with Russia; still they are told to share their limited means with even poorer migrants who come from countries at war or in chaos in part due to irresponsible interventionism from a few Western countries.
Merkel's treatment of Greece last July and throughout the past six years was also 'very open and democratic': you change your own self Greek or you go bankrupt! The austerity that Germany imposed on several South European states was not only wrong and severely damaging to those economies but was also anti-democratic.
The truth is not black and white.
Europe should rethink what is democracy first and ensure that the various peoples accept their differences and cooperate closely on such a totally new basis. This is where solidarity should start.

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